What everyone is missing about trademarks

If you don't "aggressively" defend it you don't own it.  I learned this when developing restaurant concepts. Trade dress is defineable and defensible, and if you overlook anyone taking too much "inspiration" from your trade dress, you can't do anything about someone else looking like your website, or signage, or packaging, or layout.

The highly educated techno- geeks get all pissy when Apple vigorously prosecutes any infringement. But if Apple doesn't, they relinquish their rights to the brand.  That is why any big brand has an army of lawyers scouring for even imagined incursions. Disney is famous for it. So is Coke, and clothing designers, publishers, movie studios, etc.

If you want to be sure you aren't drinking brown carbonated piss in Chang Mai, you are happy about that.  Counterfeiting is simply the more egregious end of the spectrum that starts with trade dress. Trade dress is what companies hire architects, graphic designers, web designers, consultants, engineers and all manner of people who don't want their work ripped off, to build.

So is Apple being mean to Samsung? No, they are drawing a line to discourage others, and telling the international courts "You damn betcha we have always staunchly defended out patents!"

Now that we all are brands, we should know a bit more about the implications. If you happen to have a twitter handle, say, MiniMouse, expect a Disney letter to show up someday, or should I say expect Twitter to kill your account.  If you do due diligence, establish an identity that is unique, then see it shamelessly copied and do nothing about it, simply move on to developing a new one, because you have lost the old one.

Of course, if the whole issue between Samsung and Apple could be argued out on Twitter, we really wouldn't require trademark protection law, would we?  Once that simple example is understood, the rest is less hard to fathom.

boyd | apophenia » A Customer Service Nightmare: Resolving Trademark and Personal Reputation in a Limited Name Space
Read it online: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/04/28/a-customer-service-nightmare-resolving-trademark-and-personal-reputation-in-a-limited-name-space.html
Sent via TweetDeck (http://tweetdeck.com)